So on to the new plugins we write and are about to write; Just last week we decided it would be good to implement some reward and recognition model to our hard working Yammerees. As easily as done as said we now have an Achievements Bot which runs every 4 hours and tracks which people reach the 50/1000/5000 yams milestones and sends out a Yam congratulating the colleagues. Although in the ramp up phase while building the database we got a lot of false positives because the database had to build up, and people with 400 posts being congratulated with achieving the 50 yam mark, it has added a positive fibe to Yammer.

The next challenge will probably be a bot that can generate some usage statistics to create dashboards, but I might wait for other tools that are around. Development of tools seems to be going quite slowly, or I am just overlooking the right sites and communities.

If you have some nice suggestions or want some help in developing this kinds of bots (PHP based) drop me a line.

The last days I had this feeling about a portal project I did this winter and finished end of May. I originally titled this topic “portals from hell” but that is a bit dramatic. I might explain in more detail at some other stage, but lets just summarize the project with an architecture based on a Non-XHTML CMS as backend, a Backbase Portal front-end and IE6 support (+ some evils like nested iframes, iframe’s as modals, state management, progressive enhancement, click-, submit- and navigation-interception) and you’ll probably get an impression.

A ‘Software Engineer’ would probably state we delivered low quality using little design patterns, series of hacks and just basically screwed up. A front-end scripter might just run away at the first sight of the complexities we introduced trying to solve the simplest concepts. An architect would just say we need more architecture. And even a sane project manager (sorry Robin) would have stepped out in the first stage. And still.

In the end the people person might just note that the project was one of passion. Passion to succeed and a drive to make even the impossible possible. Strengthened by my experience within a recent bid where we had a passionate team as well I think there are just three key elements to a successful effort: people, passion and vision.
Leadership is one I am hesitant to add, because it is too hard to define is too ambiguousness and has too many books written on the topic – I read only two, which where useful, but I learned just recently from TED Rotterdam that the best ideas might actually come from complete isolation. Where is this going? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll try and post some more when I find my natural leadership and the key to repeatable success.

For now I just decided to go with the people person camp and imagine the project is just a once in a lifetime gem of complete evilness turning into beauty following our combined sheer passion.

Although his observations are sound, on the topic of lurkers I do not agree that you should be focusing on making lurkers followers and have them join your (or anothers) group. The limitation in his argumentation is that lurkers do not contribute to the discussion, but just like to read your spills and enjoy your writing. However if not frequent the offline discussion is completely overlooked. Not rarely I have discussions with co-workers or friends on stuff I read in twitter or Yammer that I do not re-tweet, yammer-like-retweet or even consider blogging or writing about myself. In that sense I am a frequent lurker when you opt out the afk life.

So myself I just decided to not go on a crusade on convicting my lurkers to become my friends. Also because I am terribly bad at maintaining friendships, but more because I don’t feel people should always be contributing online in order to be contributing. (And I like to think that offline private discussions are worth more than online ones, surely when you take into consideration the TED Rotterdam speech by Bas Haring.)

As to the below list is probably missing some serious must-have application, lets first share my list (albeit a short one), and then complement it as the coming days pass and I need more tools: Firefox, Iron, Safari, IETester, Fiddler + Fiddlerhook, AppServ (WAMP stack), Firebug, Web developer toolbar, JDK 6, Eclipse, Crimson Editor, Winmerge, Tortoise, Ant; I probably add FileZilla and 7zip later on, but didn’t have to use them at this stage.

And for the fun of it: Whatpulse

For the time being my work on the frontport wordpress portal plugin has not been completed. (Probably should not have developed it on a crashing ubuntu usb disk in the first place). But hey who gives if you can browse through the wordpress theme and stumble upon such a beauty as http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/intrepidity.
Until frontport finished this looks okay. I hope you (or I, as no one is actually reading this but me) like the new theme and don’t get too bored soon.

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